Thirteenth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

EU-Russia energy relations have been a crucial aspect of European foreign policy over the past two decades. This paperl considers how EU-Russia energy relations have changed from 2000 until 2018 by analysing how four central discourses -liberalization, interdependence, supply security, and environmentalism - have been employed over that period. The driving question is: if and how dominant discourses have changed over this period, how these changes reflect political realities, and what the political function, if any, of those changes could be. This locates this project as constructivist since it focuses on how politics evolves as a linguistic and social construction rather than focusing on traditional building blocks like military power and control (realism). The preliminary chapters of this paper introduce and operationalize the key theoretical concepts of securitization theory, riskification, and security jargon. The backbone of the study is its employment of these concepts in a discourse analysis of EU discourse over the period in question. The paper concludes that EU official discourse saw a gradual and continual increase in supply security discourse, but that this was not accompanied by securitization processes.